The second edition of the Parees Mural Festival in Oviedo, Spain will be held throughout September. It’s a festival I am personally really interested in and will heading up north for at least a few days to check out the works as they progress. Below is the official press release from the festival and I’l be sharing some other bits and pieces before the start date over the next few weeks. And then hopefully some amazing pics and stories from the event itself!

The Oviedo Mural intervention festival extends its proposal in this second edition, which will be held all throughout September bringing together artists of national and international renown.

The program includes seven medium and large format interventions by Twee Muizen, who will renew a partition wall of the writer Leopoldo Alas Clarín; while Colectivo Licuado, Alfalfa, Andrea Ravo, Kruella d’Enfer and Xav, will be in charge of making a piece in Tudela Veguín dedicated to the late Tino Casal.

With the intent of bringing urban art closer to all audiences, the festival also organizes free activities, such as bike routes and graffiti and mural art workshops aimed at children and people over 65 years of age.

The Parees Festival combines a global spirit with a local vocation, linking its activities to the territory through participatory processes in which citizens intervene in the transformation of their environment.

After last year’s success, The Parees Festival grows bigger and it will hold its second edition in September. The Oviedo Mural intervention festival, organized by the Municipal Culture Foundation, is a cultural and social event that aims to promote dialogue and, intervene and improve the environment through urban art. The city will expand its public heritage with new interventions in partition walls and walls in a program that also includes free and participatory activities, such as bike routes and graffiti workshops for different audiences.

Mural interventions

The walls narrate the history of cities and build the symbolic identity of their inhabitants, therefore, artistic interventions mean both an opportunity to enhance social bonds in the public space as well as improving the environment. The 2018 Parees Festivalwill gather outstanding national and international artists in Oviedo in order to create different pieces that will be added to the works made during the festival’s first edition (Catalog 2017), thus expanding the urban art heritage of the city.

One of the outstanding creations is that of Twee Muizen, a pair of artists that won the Leopoldo Alas Clarín Competition that the Parees Festival promoted to renew the mural dedicated to this writer located on a 16 x 5 meter wall in Santa Clara Street in Oviedo. The piece ‘Clarín’ was made three decades ago by Florentino Flórez and this initiative is inscribed in the will of the festival to recover and value the 80’s mural movement.

Florentino Florez

The 2018 Parees Festival will start on September 1st with the intervention of the Uruguayan Colectivo Licuado, who will make a large-format piece in its characteristic figurative style inspired by the cultures, traditions and stories they have known throughout their travels. The Italian artist, Andrea Ravo, will develop in Oviedo one of his impressive pieces, which usually inspired by the paintings of the masters of the history of art and become large outdoor canvases.

Colectivo LicuadoAndrea Ravo

During the Parees festival, we will also see the universe of Alfalfa, artistic name of the Venezuelan Nicolás Sánchez who, in his works, explores fantasy as a refuge and rescues mythology and local legends. The fantastic beings, in this case magical and mysterious animals, are also the protagonists of the pieces bythe Portuguese visual artist and illustrator Kruella d’Enfer.
In addition, The Parees Festival will be present in Tudela Veguín thanks to Xav, Asturian tattoo artist who will pay homage to one of the illustrious sons of the city, the late singer, Tino Casal.

XavKruella d’Enfer

Activities:

The Parees Festival will come to an end on the last weekend of September, offering activities for all audiences. On Saturday 29th, a group of people over 65 will make a joint mural. It will be the result of a one week workshop focused on exploring the past, an initiative that aims to make the voice of this collective visible in the public space while, at the same time, bringing muralism closer to it as a creative and communication tool.

On Sunday, September 30th, there will be another experimental graffiti workshop for children and it will be held by Lainopia Educación Artística. And designed for a family audience, for the second time, The Parees Festival organizes the ‘drift through the murals’, a bicycle route to see up close some of the interventions made during the first and second editions of the festival.

A commitment on participation:

The Oviedo Mural intervention festival is clearly committed to promote a participatory approach, with the aim of positively influencing the coexistence in the public space and invigorating the social and cultural life of the territory. The artists are accompanied by the local mediators Raposu Roxu (Laura Lara and Olga Roces) who facilitate meetings with people and significant entities of the municipality from which they will draw their sketches.

This approach of working collectively on the ground enables the artists to be agents of change, allowing them to develop their works while staying connected to the social reality that surrounds them, stimulating dialogue about public space and building bridges of connection between the community. This is a formula that was already successfully put into practice in the festival’s first edition, in which Agostino Iacurci, Anna Taratiel and Bitxo made three murals based on participatory processes.

About the director

The Oviedo mural intervention festival is directed by Eduard Crespo Ferran, member of the national urban art scene and resident in Asturias for years. In 2007 he formed the association Difusor, a pioneer in the management of legal walls and organizer of the Open Walls Conference festivals (Barcelona). The entity has been one of the most relevant actors in the paradigm shift of the perception and administration of artistic interventions in public spaces and is currently developing multiple artistic and cultural projects, both local and international, in various fields, such as artistic management of public space, education, training and consulting.